The winter, which brought us quite a lot of new products from ATI, such as the Radeon X1900 and the CrossFire Xpress 3200, is over, but there is one final blizzard coming to a retail outlet near you: the Sapphire’s Toxic Radeon X1900 XTX. The graphics card that features liquid-cooling and increased clock-speeds promises silent operation amid extreme performance. We decided to take a look at this product!

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

This game was not tested in the “eye candy” mode because its HDR support is automatically disabled even on ATI’s Radeon X1000 cards on turning on FSAA; the graphics quality without HDR is much poorer. The Bloom effect is not supported simultaneously with HDR, either.

The hero of this review is on top in Oblivion because its heart is an R580 chip with 48 pixel processors. This game abounds in mind-bogglingly complex shaders, so the Sapphire Toxic Radeon X1900 XTX turns in the best result. The GeForce 7900 GTX tries to challenge it in 1280x1024 but has a considerably lower minimum speed even there. Here, every resolution is available to the owner of a Toxic Radeon X1900 XTX!

Keep it in mind, however, that we’re dealing with closed scenes of the game like caves, dungeons, houses, etc. Even the most powerful cards slow down as you go out into the open.

None of today’s graphics cards can singly provide at least 50fps in the open spaces of the Tamriel Empire. Moreover, only the Radeon X1900 family cards can keep the frame rate above 25fps. The average performance of the GeForce 7900 GTX is almost the same, but its min speed may be much lower than 20fps in some hardest scenes even in 1024x768 resolution. This is too slow.